


An Ordinary Unordinary Life

by StudentOfEtherium



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gay, Gen, Multiplicity/Plurality, One-Sided Attraction, POV First Person, Spoilers, magical plurality is still plurality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26001337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StudentOfEtherium/pseuds/StudentOfEtherium
Summary: Time has passed, letting Tenko and Angie settle into their new lives, but not everything is dealt with quite yet.
Kudos: 7





	An Ordinary Unordinary Life

**Author's Note:**

> sequel to [After the Cage Lifted](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24498202)

I woke up early. It took a few seconds to gather myself when I first opened my eyes and took in my surroundings. As soon as I realized where I was, I groaned. I had gone to bed before Angie under the assumption the flighty artist would bring us back to our room at a reasonable time, but judging by the fact that I was waking up on the floor of Angie’s lab, I could assume that hadn’t happened at all. I let out an irritated groan and stretched. The beds provided by the school were far from the best I had slept in, but it was still preferable to sleeping on the hardwood floor of the Artist lab. With a sigh, I returned to our room. 

Without giving myself any time to rest, I changed into my training clothes. I took a number of warm-up laps around campus to wake myself and clear my head; I ended my run at my lab, where I trained for little over an hour. By the time I was nearly done, a student council member knocked on the door to let me know that breakfast would be ready soon. Taking note of his words, I quickly finished my practice and headed to Angie and I’s dorm. While we had more time until breakfast would be ready, I had nothing to do with that time, so instead of resting, I showered and got dressed for the day; by the time I was done, it was nearly time, so I left and walked towards the main campus building at a leisurely pace.

As I entered the dining hall, I was swarmed by student council members. I got them to leave me alone by letting them know Angie wasn’t awake yet and made my way to the kitchen. I checked internally to see if she was waking up yet. To my disappointment, she was already waking up. Rather than risk annoying her when she was fully up, I opted to prepare a breakfast that would work for the both of us. I sat down at the table with the rest of our classmates and the ten bodies at the table began breakfast.

“Oh! Good morning!” Angie greeted me internally. I sighed and responded. “Hey. I noticed you never took us to bed last night.” I could feel she felt sheepish at that. “Well… I planned to. But then I passed out before I had the chance.” Sensing my irritation, she giggled and dropped the subject.

She switched to the front and greeted the others at the table. She was met with an enthusiasm not afforded to me. I dropped from the front and let her deal with the crowd. Unfortunately, with little else to do to entertain myself, I stuck around and watched Angie talk with the others. In spite of her carefree nature, she was quite affable. Most everyone in our class loved her. It’s not that I disliked her, but sharing a body with someone is good at making clear what aspects of them irritate you. Currently most relevant was her choice of sleeping arrangements the night prior. I made a mental note to bring it up with her later when we had more time to ourselves.

I found myself lost in thought and the rest of breakfast passed by in a flash. The group finished up and the student who was assigned to clean the dining room and kitchen set about their duty. I switched back in and packaged some of the food that remained. I gestured to Maki to come with me and we returned to the dorm building together. Instead of returning to either of our rooms, we headed to the room directly below the room Angie and I now shared. Tsumugi Shirogane’s room.

The days after Korekiyo Shinguji’s trial had been chaotic. Several students which had been hesitant to take Angie’s side took her coming back from the dead as a reason to trust her. With the majority of the class supporting her, she had been able to successfully bring an end to the killing game. It wasn’t more than a few days later that the headmaster began trying to encourage another murder, but despite his effort, the student council’s rules and protections ensured that no killing happened. 

A number of weeks passed after that. A student rebellion ensured the headmaster was no longer in control of the school as he previously was. People were safe. Unfortunately, that safety only lasted for so long. People began to notice suspicious signs of something amiss. The student council took proactive measures around the door in the library to ensure the mastermind wouldn’t be able to sneak in. Unfortunately, despite our measures, an attempt was still made. It was a miracle the mastermind was caught before she was able to resume the killing game.

Tsumugi Shirogane was outed as the one behind the deaths and our imprisonment.

Hell immediately broke out after that. Angie and I had to intervene to keep Tsumugi alive. Our first step had been to contain her to her room. It was quickly agreed upon that while she would be staying alive, we couldn’t risk her being free. At our request, Miu tinkered with the door to ensure it locked from the outside. With her room as her cell, she was harmless.

I knocked on her door before opening it. I peeked in and upon seeing the blue-haired girl, gestured to Maki. She nodded and I entered the room. Once I was through the door, she closed it and I heard it lock. I stepped forward and waved at the prisoner. Tsumugi was sitting in a chair near a table in the center of the room. She scowled at me. I set the box of food on the table and walked over to the desk to grab a chair for myself. I set it near the table and sat down. She glared at me the whole time. I pointed at the table. “Here. Breakfast.” She didn’t move. I continued, “I’m staying here until you eat. Please do that quickly.” She stayed still. Angie spoke up. “C'mon, Tsumugi! You should eat!” She rolled her eyes. “Or what?” Angie frowned. The malicious girl continued. “If you’re not planning to let me out of this room, then what reason do I have for staying alive? I’ve told you everything you need to know about the killing game. You could just let me starve to death.” Angie shook her head. “That’s not an option! Like all children of God, you deserve a full life of your own.” She groaned and started rubbing her forehead. “Look. You know I don’t take that bul-” I cut her off. “And you know I don’t either, but I want you to eat anyway. Regardless of your position in this, we want you alive.”

“Why?”

“You know I can’t be rehabilitated. You know that as soon as I could, I would start the killing game anew and condemn you all to death. Keeping me alive is a liability. So why do it?” Angie and I shrugged. “We could give you a number of reasons why from either of us, but frankly, we don’t want another death, period.” Angie took control of the conversation again and started pleading with the imprisoned mastermind. “Please, Tsumugi.” She stared at us with an unamused look in her eyes. She broke the stare and turned to the box on the table. “Fine. I’ll eat.” Angie and I breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t always this difficult.

As she started opening it, I explained the contents of her breakfast. “This is mostly Maki’s leftovers, with some from Keebo and I mixed in.” She poked at the food, then started eating. Between bites, she turned and asked a question. “So will I ever be given food that isn’t the rejected parts no one else ate? Or is part of my punishment to live on scraps for the rest of my life? ”I shrugged. “If we ever have reason to trust you enough to let you out of your room, sure.” She glared at me. “And will that ever happen?” I shrugged indifferently. “Maybe. It all depends on you.” She fell silent and stayed that way for the rest of her meal. When she was done, I collected the utensils she had used. I walked over to the door and knocked on it to signal to Maki that we were done. She opened the door and I left. As I did, I glanced back at Tsumugi once more. She was still glaring at me.

I left the dorms and parted ways with Maki. The next plans the body had was a student council meeting Angie had scheduled to take place in a few hours. That meant we had time to kill. Given I had spent the morning training with the body, we agreed Angie could spend that time in her lab. I switched out and watched her as she returned to her lab. As I had fallen asleep before her and had left for our dorm room quickly after waking up, I hadn't had the opportunity to see what she had been working on the night before. I wasn’t particularly surprised to see it was a statue. She made those often. I zoned out and let her work in peace. By the time I came to again, she was nearly done. I stayed quiet as I watched her finish. Her attention to detail was meticulous, a shift from her typical airy personality. It was fascinating to watch. She stepped back to examine her work. She slowly walked in a circle around the statue and a couple times stopped to brush away dust or debris. Once she was satisfied, she sat down in front of it and laid back until we were staring at the ceiling. She wiped some sweat from our forehead and let out a breath I hadn’t noticed she was holding. We laid there in silence for a few minutes before I stood up. “How long was that?” Angie fidgeted as she thought. “I wasn’t keeping track, but I think it’s been over an hour?” I sighed and stood up. I left her lab, locking it behind me, and wandered off in search of a clock of some kind. “At some point, we should get a clock in your lab so you stop doing this.” She shrugged and didn’t argue the topic.

I found a clock in one of the halls and found that Angie’s time estimate was off considerably. We had just a couple minutes until the meeting. Thankfully, they met in the lab, so we turned around and walked back. “If you’d take any longer, they would have walked in while you were working.” Angie gave an air of indifference at that. “If they did, I would’ve paused my work.” I rolled my eyes. We got back to the room and with our limited time left, I set out chairs for our classmates who would be arriving. Angie kept her room messy enough that finding them proved difficult and by the time I was done, the others were arriving. We sat down near each other and the meeting began.

I started the conversation. “We still don’t have any ideas for dealing with Tsumugi long-term. Every day this becomes a more and more pressing issue.” Himiko was the first to respond. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t take part in these meetings, traitor.” I grimaced and stepped back from the front a little. Keebo spoke up in my place. “You pushed for that, but it wasn’t unanimous. And she’s not wrong.” Himiko crossed her arms and sulked. Keebo continued. “Keeping Tsumugi locked in her room is wrong. She might be the one behind the killing game, but if we’re going to keep her alive, we should let her have a life.” Angie joined in the argument. “I agree! She should be let out!” I shook our head and responded. “The problem with that is we know she would start the killing game anew if she could, so we would need to restrict her ability to do so. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for us to know every trick she has on the school grounds, so letting her out of the question.” Himiko scowled at me and maintained a glare. Despite that, she spoke up. “The traitor is right. If we let her out, the killing game will begin again. That’s antithetical to the goal and purpose of this very student council, so we can’t do that.”

Keebo’s face showed his conflicted emotions very clearly. “You’re right that preventing the killing game from resuming is our goal, but just as much our goal is to protect and care for every student at this school, and that includes Tsumugi.” He paused to let someone else speak, but when nobody took the chance, he continued. “I don’t know what solution would work best to ensure that we can make Tsumugi’s life at this school more tolerable, but that’s what we’re here to do. We must make sure that we are not acting with cruelty to her.” Angie started clapping. “I agree, I agree!” The council turned to face us as Angie continued. “We should let her have more freedom because all children of God deserve that. Tsumugi might have betrayed us and started the killing game, but if we hold that against her for her whole life, we aren’t allowing her to improve. If we imprison her and make her waste her life trapped in that one cramped bedroom, are we really any different than her?”

I spoke up at that. “Yes, we are different. She’s responsible for five deaths. She would be responsible for more. Hell, she’s responsible for  _ your _ death. We can’t just let her go free because you feel bad about keeping her there. She is a threat to all of us and she must be treated as such.” Angie responded. “This isn’t about whether or not I feel bad. This is about granting forgiveness to all children of God. It is his will we all live by and it is by his will we are here in the first place.” I sighed internally. I knew what she was saying would be impossible for me to argue against in the eyes of the other student council members. Indeed, as I looked back across the room at the others around us, I saw Himiko’s face full of confusion and conflicted emotions. I sighed externally and stepped back from the front, saying a quick goodbye to the others.

I continued watching the scene from there. Angie picked up the conversation first. “Tenko is right that we can’t let Tsumugi run free, but we must find a solution that enables her to have more freedoms than she does now. Does anyone have suggestions?” A pair of hands were raised around the room. In situations like this, the student council spoke clockwise, so Himiko mentioned her idea first. “What if we only let her out when she has a guard with her?” Angie clapped her hands. “That’s an interesting solution, Himiko, thanks for bringing that up!” The short redhead smiled at being praised like that. Next went Keebo. “What if we installed a window in her room so she could get sunlight without having to go outside!” Angie nodded. “I see, I see. That’s certainly worth considering.” She looked up. “Gonta? Do you have anything to say about this?” The large boy shook his head. Angie nodded again. Himiko spoke up. “Keebo, the problem with your solution is that installing that window would be hard when we don’t have the tools to do that and the process of installing it would require her room have a large gaping hole in the side for who knows how long, all for something that would give her no more freedom and just remind her of the outside she’s being kept from.” The robot boy looked dejected at that. “Yeah… You’re right” I took the front again. “Your idea would work, though, Himiko. We already need guards whenever people visit her room, so it’s not too much to ask that they escort her out. We would have to limit where she goes, but I think letting her eat meals with us, if only once a day, would be an adequate solution.” Himiko sulked as I spoke. Rather than respond to me, she turned to the other members of the student council. “So is my idea good? Will that be what we go with?” The group nodded. Angie clapped our hands loudly. “Then we have a solution!” She stood up. “When it’s almost time for dinner, we’ll find someone to help us escort her to the dining room.”

The group wrapped up pretty quickly after that. Having dealt with the main topic at hand, there wasn’t much else to discuss and it was talked through rather quickly. I stopped paying attention and started drifting in and out of consciousness. The next time I was fully awake, we were in our room again. Angie was praying. She noticed me, but ignored me in favor of continuing her prayers. I stayed out of her way. Before long, she was done. I stood up and stretched. “How long was I-” I cut myself off and decided to check a clock in our room rather than hear Angie tell me she didn’t know yet again. It had been little over an hour since the meeting had started, meaning I had likely been unconscious for just under a half hour. “Do you mind if I spend some time training before dinner?” The artist shook our head and I prepared myself for that.

Before long, I found myself in my lab. I started with a basic warmup routine and quickly got lost in the movements. It was an automatic process for me, having spent so much of my life on practice like this. I lost myself in those familiar movements I always took and found myself deep in thought.

Key on my mind was Himiko. Since the trial, we hadn’t talked much. She was never especially outgoing around me, but since then, she turned outright hostile. I had assumed her behavior to be the result of her being a quiet girl, and that assumption was still yet to be proven wrong, but her feelings towards me were something different. Upon learning my membership in the cult had been an act on my part so I could ensure her safety, she lashed out. I was immediately branded a traitor and not even Angie could calm her anger. It was devastating to see. From that point forward, I kept my distance. It hurt to do that, but it hurt more to talk to her and be reminded of how she felt. I typically kept quiet during student council meetings for that reason. Today was an exception due to the dire nature of the topic at hand.

Unfortunately, for all the distance I gave her, it couldn’t be less literal. The small girl clung to Angie constantly. When she knew I was around, she would give more space. It hurt. Angie and I talked about this often. In her typical carefree way, she didn't seem to put much weight on the issue. Even after I explained my feelings, she seemed indifferent. I'd come to the conclusion she just doesn't understand love. If I could have avoided the topic with her, I would have, but unfortunately, I didn't have that freedom anymore.

I kept wishing for a conversation between the two of us. I wished she would let me explain myself. Before all this started, I stayed quiet for fear of how she would react. Now, every time I tried, I would be brushed off or told in harsher words to leave her alone. Angie had tried to play peacebroker, but much like anything else between Himiko and I, it was fruitless.

I heard the sound of snapping wood and suddenly my thoughts cleared. In part due to pent-up frustration and in part to a lack of focus in my training, I'd snapped the wooden sparring dummy I had been practicing with. I examined the scene and quickly realized I had broken it with a kick. If I were in a better mood, I'd be impressed. It had flown across the room and hit a wall on the other side. I sighed deeply. From experience, I knew damages I caused would be repaired overnight by some unseen force, but I still didn't like causing damage to my equipment. It showed I lacked restraint. It showed I could be better. I walked to a few feet away and faced another, and began my practice anew, putting aside the worrying thoughts that had consumed me just a minute before.

I spent a number of hours practicing in my lab. It made the time pass quickly. After what felt like just a short time, I stopped for a break. As I did so, I checked the time and realized it was closer to dinner than I had previously realized. I prodded Angie, who had been humming prayers for at least an hour straight, until she came to attention. I let her take control of the body and she walked over to the dining room. It was still empty, so she continued through into the kitchen. She opened the pantry and looked around until she had an idea of what to make. At that point, she sprung into action. It seemed that the Ultimate Artist talent was rather vague in what it applied to. It came off as more postmodern than I would’ve expected of Angie. Nonetheless, food was an art and so she was the best living cook among the remaining students. She moved efficiently, preparing a large dinner for everyone who would be attending. Unlike breakfast, we eat as a group at dinner. Angie nearly always did the cooking. She insisted it was her job as leader of the student council, but she couldn't hide from me that it was something she took genuine enjoyment from. She found cooking fun, like every other kind of art she made, but more than that she was happy to cook for this eclectic community that had been gathered here. She saw her art as something to make for everyone, which pushed her to excel. Despite my issues with her, I found that attitude admirable.

By the time she was done, people were filling into the dining room. Keebo came into the kitchen and offered her help carrying food into the main room. Once that was done, the student council gathered quickly and agreed that Himiko and Gonta would be the ones to escort her from her dorm to the dining room. When the trio arrived back, Tsumugi was sullen. She was sat between our body and Keebo. Then, Angie led the group in prayer. The usual voices rang out in unison. I could tell Tsumugi didn't join in. Once Angie was done, dinner began. Individual conversations around the table began between the different groups, such as Kaito, Shuichi, and Maki, or Miu and Kokichi. I opted to stay inside and let Angie talk to the student council members around her. It was a lively meal, aside from the sulking ex-mastermind. Despite her moody exterior, both Angie and I could tell that letting her out was already having a positive effect on her.

It was more than a half hour before people started leaving the table. Miu went first, as she often did. Maki quickly followed suit and from there people started leaving en masse. It was agreed that Keebo would wash the dishes. Rather than linger, I opted to take our body back to our dorm room. After a day like we had, I wanted some rest.

Unfortunately, I could only get so much before I had to get up again. Nighttime hours began and I had one more duty to do before I could sleep. I hurried downstairs and knocked on Miu’s door. I heard some loud sounds from behind before it opened up and Miu burst out. “C'mon, bitch. Let's go.” I rolled my eyes at her, but didn't respond. We left the building together and she practically ran towards her lab. I kept pace and it didn't take us more than a minute to get there. I opened the door and we stepped into the messy lab. I sighed and went over the rules. “Don't leave your lab. When you're ready for bed, contact a student council member and they will escort you back. Please don't fall asleep in your lab again.” The blonde groaned and gestured for me to leave. “Yeah, yeah. I've heard that shit so many times. Now just get the fuck out and leave me alone.” Without another word, I turned around and left.

I returned to our dorm. By now, I was exhausted. Angie had passed out some time between returning to our dorm and leaving to escort Miu to her lab. If I hadn't had that responsibility, I likely would have been asleep by this point too. I quickly hurried to get ready for bed and once I was laying down, I fell asleep in a matter of minutes.

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea what i'd do with the setting for a third fic in this AU, but if i ever come up with one i definitely wanna write it because ive been having fun with this
> 
> maybe someday i'll write a fic where Tenko can be happy, but judging by my upcoming writing plans, that won't be soon...


End file.
